Category: Media

Beware the Democratic ‘pseudo-recession’ that’s destroyed past presidents.

Back in 1992, as the presidential campaign approached, incumbent President George HW Bush was seen as a shoo-in for reelection.

The First Gulf War ended in 1991 with a spectacular US victory at the head of a coalition that had expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with few losses.

For much of 1991, Bush’s approval ratings hovered between 90% and 70%.

By February 1992, an obscure Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, emerged as the favorite Democratic nominee.

But he was written off as having little chance to knock off the popular Republican incumbent with far more foreign affairs experience.

Bush, however, had just lost his brilliant 1988 campaign manager, Lee Atwater, to cancer.

Most important, the US economy in 1990 had experienced a mild recession that had bottomed out in early 1991.

By the 1992 election, the United States was headed to full recovery.

In the last six months of 1992, GDP rebounded at an astonishing 4%.

The inflation rate in the months before the election was often less than 3%.

Even stubborn unemployment, at 7.3%, was starting to fall.

The eight-month recession officially ended in March 1991, followed by continual positive economic growth.

No matter: The canny Clinton campaign still ran on the directive “It’s the economy, stupid” and the slogan “Putting people first.”

Clinton’s theme song was the upbeat Fleetwood Mac hit “Don’t Stop,” highlighting the young Clinton-Gore ticket’s supposed contrast to the 68-year-old Bush.

Key to the Clinton campaign rhetoric was a false charge: “the worst job growth since the Great Depression.”

By November 1992, Clinton had convinced voters that the prior year’s recession was still in full force.

The doom-and-gloom, near-depression “recession” rhetoric, together with Perot’s third-party candidacy and Bush’s sluggish campaign, won Clinton the presidency with 43% of the popular vote.

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Newsweek Puts Out Misinformation on our New Research Comparing Armed Civilians to Police in Stopping Active Shootings: Study Praising Armed Civilians Sparks Criticism

Our research is available here. After the Newsweek was published on Friday, November 21, 2025, the reporter updated her article on Monday, November 24, 2025.

Devin Hughes, founder and president of gun violence research organization GVPedia, told Newsweek, “The paper is fraud, which I do not use lightly.”

Hughes alleges that the study defines active shooter incidents differently from the FBI.

“Lott’s study then only applies that new definition to cases in which there was a defensive gun use, while deliberately excluding thousands of cases in which a defensive gun use did not occur,” Hughes said. “This deceptive tactic allows Lott to claim that the percentage of active shooter cases stopped by a defensive gun use is vastly higher than it is in reality, regardless of what definition of an active shooting one uses. The end result is blatant statistical malpractice.”

Lott told Newsweek that the FBI’s definition excludes gang violence, drug related violence and shootings in relation to another criminal act.

“The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area,” Lott said. “But it does not include those it deems related to other criminal activity, such as a robbery or fighting over drug turf. Over the period from 2014 to 2024, the FBI includes 14 cases where a legally armed civilian used a gun to stop an active shooting attack. We think that the number is 199. We thought it was useful to fill in the rest of these cases using the exact same definition that excluded ‘gang violence,’ ‘drug related violence,’ and ‘shootings in relation to another criminal act’ to see how police and civilians compared in dealing with these attacks.”

Jenna Sundel, “Study Praising Armed Civilians Sparks Criticism,” Newsweek, November 24, 2025.

Dr. Lott’s response to this point included this.

While I appreciate you making some updates to your article, you make it sound as if it is just our word versus Hughes when you simply write “Lott told Newsweek that the FBI’s definition excludes gang violence, drug related violence, and shootings in relation to another criminal act.” But I have provided you links to the FBI active shooting reports where you can confirm for yourself that the FBI does in fact exclude these types of crimes (see the fourth paragraph on page five in their first report and page 2 in their latest report. It is something that they list out in EVERY report in between these two reports).

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WSJ Launches Another Attack on ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws

In late October, the Wall Street. Journal ran a big piece claiming that “it’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it,” because of Stand Your Ground laws. The paper claimed that justifiable homicides by civilians increased by 59% from 2019 through 2024 in a “large sample of cities and counties” in 30 states with Stand Your Ground statutes, compared with a  smaller 16% in in total homicides in the same jurisdictions.

As we noted at the time, the WSJ’s piece had several flaws, including ignoring the fact that, besides the 30 states with Stand Your Ground statutes, there are another eight states where Stand Your Ground is found in common law. And importantly, the paper’s investigation didn’t really spend any time at all considering whether the law is allowing more people to legitimately act in self-defense.

Well, now the WSJ is out with a followup of sorts, this one allegedly focusing on “the self-defense cases that made Jacksonville No. 1 in legal homicides.” And yet again, the paper’s reporting alleges that Stand Your Ground laws are letting an untold number of people get away with murder.

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Wall Street Journal’s Misrepresentation of Stand Your Ground Laws Great for Prosecutors

Stand Your Ground laws get a lot of press, and most of it is based on absolute nonsense. They repeat a lot of pathetic talking points with no bearing on reality, but we haven’t seen much lately about them.
But then the Wall Street Journal stepped up and unleashed the stupid.
It starts with their headline, proclaiming, “Six Words Every Killer Should Know: ‘I Feared for My Life, Officer’.”
In theory, it’s an exploration of the increase in justified homicides that has happened since such laws became the norm. That’s probably a worthy topic of examination, too, because how many people would have been free had some prosecuted not convinced a jury that the person who actually was afraid for their life really could have gotten away?
Because that’s all these laws do. They make it so you’re not required to retreat first before using lethal force in self-defense, and that means no one can play Monday morning quarterback and decide there was an opening in a gate behind a dumpster you totally could have used to get away.
But no, that’s not what the WSJ does. Instead, we get this crap:

“It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it.

In 30 states, it often requires only a claim you killed while protecting yourself or others.
While Americans have long been free to use deadly force to defend themselves at home, so-called stand-your-ground laws in those 30 states extend legal protections to public places and make it difficult for prosecutors to file homicide charges against anyone who says they killed in self-defense.
The number of legally sanctioned homicides by civilians in the 30 stand-your-ground states has risen substantially in recent years, The Wall Street Journal found in an analysis of data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Justifiable homicides by civilians increased 59% from 2019 through 2024 in a large sample of cities and counties in those states, the Journal found, compared with a 16% rise in total homicides for the same locales.
With more guns in more hands, families are grieving loved ones lost to quick-tempered killings, often involving law-abiding civilians, with no one held accountable.
A retired Las Vegas police officer walked free after fatally shooting a retired computer network engineer during a dispute over who had the right of way in a Walmart parking lot. Both men got out of their vehicles. Both were armed. The ex-officer said the retired engineer pointed a gun at him first.
“Only two people know what happened,” said Kathleen Hoy, the dead man’s widow. “Unfortunately, my husband is dead.”
That’s the case they wanted to lead with?
I mean, sure, there are only two people who know what happened, but the fact that both men were armed suggests that there’s at least some reason to believe it’s justified.
Stand Your Ground laws don’t condone murder simply because you say you were afraid. You have to actually have a reason to be afraid.
The fact that the retired engineer in question was armed at least lends credence to the retired cop thinking his life was in danger. The fact that there wasn’t any other evidence one way or another is just how it goes sometimes.
Look, justified homicides are up, but part of that is that violent crime is also up. From the relative low of 2019, we saw a massive spike in the homicide rate in 2020 that is slowly trickling downward. With more violent crime, you have more cases where people are going to legitimately fear for their lives. Seeing an increase over such a short span is hardly shocking.
Maybe the scale of the increase is surprising, but again, how many people were really and legitimately afraid for their life before their state got a Stand Your Ground law, but went to prison because a prosecutor convinced a jury they had an avenue of retreat they totally could have made, even if the shooter didn’t think they could?
Honestly, this is trainwreck journalism. This is as biased a report as you’re going to see, and the Wall Street Journal is supposed to be more conservative than the Old Gray Lady.
This looks straight out of the New York Times’ playbook, though.

BLUF:
As with the Ad Council, the federal funding these Agree to Agree “funding partners” enjoy isn’t gun control specific. However, taxpayers should be aware that organizations that receive significant federal resources are involved in propaganda to undermine their fundamental rights.

Why are Tax Dollars Funding a Civilian Disarmament Industry Anti-Gun Agitprop TV Ad Campaign?

The idiot box has been living up to the nickname.

In recent months television viewers have been subjected to a series of anti-gun propaganda pieces produced by the Ad Council. Dubbed the Agree to Agree campaign, the ads typically feature a misleading talking point about “children” and firearms followed by an invitation to go to the Ad Council effort’s website where visitors are bombarded with further gun control agitprop. The website even invites visitors to learn about how to secure red flag gun confiscation orders.

The name might suggest an effort to bridge political disagreements, but the campaign’s list of “stakeholder partners” shows it’s a gun control effort through and through. So-called “stakeholder partners” include: Brady: United Against Gun Violence (formerly Handgun Control, Inc.); Giffords (formerly Americans for Responsibly Solutions and the Second Amendment-denying Legal Community Against Violence); Everytown for Gun Safety; and the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (named for billionaire gun control financier Michael Bloomberg). Handgun prohibition organization Violence Policy Center is not listed, although their longtime benefactor the Joyce Foundation was involved.

The campaign’s headline factoid is the following: “Gun injuries are now the leading cause of death for children and teens ages 1‑17, surpassing car crashes for the first time in two decades.” To justify the claim, the Ad Council cites a report from the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

For decades, gun control advocates and their allies in “public health” have pushed misleading talking points about children and firearms and NRA-ILA has repeatedly called them out for it.

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Trump on the Verge of Ending the Israel-Hamas War, and the Left Is Furious About It.

It’s one of the strangest spectacles in modern politics — watching left-wing pundits struggle to process the possibility that President Donald Trump could be on the verge of ending the Israel–Hamas war.

Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked the world with a bold peace plan to end the Israel–Hamas war and stabilize Gaza. On Friday, Trump gave Hamas a deadline — accept the deal by Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern or face consequences. Hamas quickly responded, agreeing to give up control of Gaza and release all remaining hostages, while saying some details still required consultation with other Palestinian factions. Trump’s firm deadline and direct approach have already accomplished what years of empty diplomacy never could — real progress toward peace.

But, rather than celebrate the prospect of peace, some commentators seem triggered by the idea that Trump, of all people, might succeed where countless global leaders have failed.

On the latest edition of CNN’s Newsnight, foreign affairs analyst Reena Nina laid out the complex diplomatic environment surrounding the ongoing negotiations. “This is a moment where you’ve got so many of the right things lined up,” she said, noting that regional pressure on Hamas has intensified. “In the Arab world, there’s a — I’m hearing a great deal of pressure from countries like, you know, Turkey and Qatar, saying to Hamas, you’ve got to do this and take this deal.”

Nina added that Hamas “realizes there aren’t a lot of windows of opportunity for this,” referencing the earlier Gilad Shalit prisoner swap. “You’re waiting for 20 hostages that are living, that we believe are still alive and possibly as many as 30 bodies,” she explained. Then she made a striking admission: “I do believe this window of opportunity is real… because I really believe President Trump. I really believe he will unleash hell and fury if they don’t follow through with this.”

Even CNN host Abby Phillip couldn’t deny the implications if this pans out. “If President Trump is able to do this, this is a major—it’s a major victory for him,” she said, before quickly pivoting to suggest Trump’s motives might not be purely humanitarian. “He wants the war to end for a lot of reasons. Some of them are personal reasons. He wants that Nobel Peace Prize,” Phillip said. But even she conceded that Trump “does not like the idea of all the death and destruction.”

That’s when the tone shifted from analysis to thinly veiled resentment. Liberal commentator Alencia Johnson admitted it was “challenging to actually hear that piece of, you know, Trump being—potentially being the one to get the ceasefire deal.” Her discomfort was palpable. “I would be interested to understand President Trump’s interest in this,” she said, suggesting skepticism about his motives. “He has said some things that are very harmful to the Palestinian people. I don’t know, you know, what his motivations are.”

Imagine being so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that you’d actually lament the prospect of peace simply because it might make Trump look good. Alencia Johnson’s comments captured this perfectly — the left’s reflexive inability to acknowledge any Trump success, even one that could save lives. Ending a brutal war and bringing home hostages should be something everyone celebrates, yet Trump’s critics sound almost offended that he might be the one to accomplish it.

CNN’s Scott Jennings was having none of it. “This is not a political issue,” he said bluntly. “Look, President Trump has been clear from the beginning he wants the hostages back.” Jennings reminded viewers that Trump “had an initial deal to get some hostages” soon after taking office in January, but that “Hamas reneged on that deal.”

“He’s been clear from the beginning,” Jennings said. “I just want these people back. The people who are alive, we pray that they’re still alive, the remains that exist — it all needs to happen and it needs to happen quickly.”

He didn’t mince words about Hamas either: “I don’t want to be strung along by these terrorists. I want the hostages. That’s what the President wants. And I don’t want him to give them very much time because they don’t deserve it and these people need to come home. We’re almost two years into this.”


Even CNN’s own analysts couldn’t deny the magnitude of the moment, yet the left’s sheer disgust at the possibility of Trump succeeding was unmistakable. You could practically hear the resentment in their voices — not because peace might finally be within reach, but because Trump might get the credit. That’s the sickness at the heart of modern leftism: they would rather see war drag on, hostages remain in tunnels, and innocent people suffer than admit that President Trump’s leadership is delivering results they could only dream of. It’s petty, it’s ideological, and it’s downright shameful.

Gun Control Disconnect: Media Overlooks, Misunderstands 2nd Amendment

By Dave Workman

ANALYSIS—Amid various reports on gun control published in the aftermath of the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting in Minneapolis in late August and last week’s assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, emerging from the reportage are some possibly uncomfortable facts.

Reports such as one from the Minnesota Reformer’s Madison McVan acknowledge how it “it’s not clear” whether any of Minnesota’s “stricter-than-average gun laws” would have prevented the fatal church shooting.

Likewise, writing at The Free Press, Deputy Managing Editor Joe Nocera acknowledges, “To be sure, no workable gun law would have prevented Kirk’s assassination. His alleged killer showed no signs of mental instability; the gun he used was a bolt-action rifle, owned by millions of Americans; and he was old enough to simply walk in a store and buy it.”

A look back in history underscores the apparent reality disconnect about existing law and mass shootings.

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Somebody Finally Admits It!
Licensed Citizens are “Responsible Gun Owners”

Here’s something you don’t see every day, especially at a “mainstream” publication such as Axios, where a recent story — which (full disclosure) included a quote from yours truly — featured a stunning acknowledgement from the CEO of the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a Seattle-based, billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobbying group.

“While we acknowledge more guns pose a greater threat to our communities, CPL holders tend to be responsible gun owners,” Alliance boss Renee Hopkins told Axios.

From an anti-gunner in the Evergreen State, that’s a choking mouthful. Just to make sure it wasn’t a typo, I spoke with reporter Christine Clarridge, a veteran journalist not known for flubbing a quote and was satisfied the remark was accurate.

Which raises the question: If the gun control crowd admits law-abiding, legally-armed citizens are not a problem, why do anti-gun-rights advocates continue pushing legislation which they know will only affect the good guys? The easy answer: They know honest citizens will remain so and they also know trying to get criminals to comply is a dead-end endeavor.

Back in 2021, Dr. John Lott, founder and CEO at the Crime Prevention Research Center, did an essay on just how law-abiding CCW permit holders are. To give readers an idea about where his research went, Lott wrote this: “In Florida and Texas, permit holders are convicted of firearms-related violations at one-twelfth of the rate at which police officers. In the 19 states with comprehensive permit revocation data, the average revocation rate is one-tenth of one percent. Usually, permit revocations occur because someone moved or died or forgot to bring their permit while carrying.”

Dr. John Lott, founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center,
says private citizens licensed to carry are far more law-abiding
than most other people.

He added, “Academics have published fifty-two peer-reviewed, empirical studies on concealed carry. Of these, 25 found that allowing people to carry reduces violent crime, and 15 found no significant effect. A minority (12) observed increases in violent crime. These 12, however, suffer from a systematic error to varying degrees: they tend to focus on the last 20 years and compare states that recently passed concealed carry laws with more lenient states that had sustained growth in permits over the past two decades. The finding that crime rose relatively in such states is consistent with permit holders reducing crime.”

The Axios piece centered on Clarridge’s report about the rising number of concealed pistol licenses in Washington state. I’ve been reporting on this for some years, but the establishment media avoids the story like the Olympic shooting competitions. Nobody on the left wants to acknowledge the Evergreen State has more than 709,000 active CPLs, and that roughly 20 percent of those licenses are held by women. What’s the number in your state, and what percentage of armed citizens are women?
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The Hearing Protection Fearmongering Continues

The Hearing Protection Act should survive the Byrd Rule challenge it’s currently dealing with, in part because, as Cam noted on Wednesday, it deals with the tax portion specifically. Remove the tax, and there’s no reason to have a registry, which was just about knowing who paid the tax.

The National Firearms Act really revolves around taxes, not availability. The way those who passed the law saw it, it didn’t violate the Second Amendment because it didn’t tell anyone what they could and couldn’t have.

Yet now that suppressors are potentially being removed from the NFA, the usual suspects are losing their minds.

And they’re fearmongering like crazy about it, such as in this op-ed.

The budget bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and now before the Senate has rightly drawn a lot of criticism for its sharp cuts to Medicaid. But what has largely escaped the public’s attention is the part of the bill that would aid mass shooters, terrorists, and assassins by deregulating gun silencers.

Silencers on guns make it harder for ordinary civilians and police to hear the sound, see the flash, and quickly detect the location of the shooter. Thus they can serve to facilitate mass shootings.

In Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 2019, a gunman who shot and killed twelve people used a silencer. At first, those present didn’t even know that a shooting was underway. Some of them began running but didn’t know which way to go because they hadn’t heard the gunfire.

I find it amusing that the author had to go back to 2019 to find a high-profile case involving a legally purchased suppressor.

First, Virginia Beach kind of proves that their inclusion on the NFA doesn’t stop bad actors from doing bad things with legally purchased suppressors if they decide to do so.

Second, this whole thing was written by someone who learned everything they know about suppressors from television or movies. A number of suppressors don’t even lower the sound of a shot enough to justify shooting without hearing protection in some cases, and none make those shots whisper quiet. Sure, people didn’t recognize the sounds at first in Virginia Beach, but part of that was simply because they didn’t realize what they were hearing in the first place.

I also notice that the author didn’t mention the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. His alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, allegedly used a 3D-printed suppressor that he didn’t purchase legally.

Unfortunately, legalizing silencers fits the pattern of Trump’s second term gun policy. He weakened the Brady background check system by revoking President Joe Biden’s Zero Tolerance Policy. Under it, the licenses of gun dealers could be cancelled if they failed to run background checks as required or sold guns to prohibited people. And Trump’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) would even allow “irresponsible and dangerous gun sellers who lost their licenses because of willful violations of the law to get back into business,” as the group Brady United put it. They can simply reapply.

And this is how you know this writer either doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about or is actively lying to his readers.

The policy didn’t somehow make it possible for licenses to be revoked for breaking the law. That’s always been on the table, as well as prosecution, should a licensed dealer fail to conduct a NICS check or knowingly sell a gun to a prohibited person. That’s still something dealers face should they do such a thing.

That wasn’t Biden’s “Zero Tolerance” policy.

What his policy did was lead to licenses being revoked for things like abbreviating a county instead of spelling it out, or misunderstanding when the 72-hour waiting period for a NICS check properly starts.

So, with either such a poor understanding of what that policy did or a propensity to outright lie to his readers, why should anyone take his expertise on suppressors seriously?

There is no reason.

Suppressors aren’t commonly used in crimes, even with them being available for 3D printing these days. They add bulk to a gun and make it harder to conceal, which most bad guys prize for various reasons. They also have a finite lifespan, which means you can only get the sound suppressed so many times before it stops.

But hey, when you’re focused on fearmongering to delusional nutjobs who are predisposed to being lied to on guns, what else can you expect?

 “The New York Times just ran a 1,400-word story to explain what cross necklaces are.”

The New York Times just wrote a 1,400-word article about a hip new symbol that everyone seems to be wearing these days:

 

This is literally The New York Times right now:

 

Across TikTok, young Christian women have been sharing the meaning behind their own cross necklaces, saying they help cultivate a sense of belonging and connection with others.

Sage Mills, a student at the University of Oklahoma who has posted videos about her cross necklace, said that seeing women in government like Ms. Leavitt and Ms. Bondi wear their own ‘makes me feel good. It makes me feel like God is the important thing for people that are governing our world.’

I guess these gals are all radical Christian nationalists!

In recent months, pastors with Christian nationalist beliefs have been invited to the White House numerous times.

UH OH!

 

 

The Times has the history lesson for anyone confused by this strange symbol.

The cross, a symbol most associated with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, first emerged during the Roman Empire when it was an instrument of mass torture, said Robert Covolo, a theologian and associate pastor at Christ Church Sierra Madre near Los Angeles.

By the 4th century, Mr. Covolo said that Christians had begun to use the cross as an emblem of their religion. Not long after, the cross became a focal point for daily jewelry. Cross jewelry dating as far back as the 5th century is prevalent in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Think about it: A 1,500 word article … in what used to be the most prominent newspaper in the world … explaining the cross to an American audience.

 

 

 

For real! Look at how they describe women in the Trump admin like strange creatures:

Cross necklaces have, in a way, become the jewelry of choice most associated with President Trump’s second administration.

Ms. Bondi owns several cross necklaces but most often appears at official events in a diamond-set version purchased at Mavilo, a jewelry store in Tampa, Fla.

Ms. Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has frequently worn a large cross pendant at press briefings. But Ms. Leavitt is not the first press secretary to wear a cross: Kayleigh McEnany, a press secretary during Mr. Trump’s first term, also wore one.

In an email, Ms. Leavitt, 27, called the cross necklace ‘the perfect accessory to any outfit,’ adding that she wears the cross ‘because it serves as a reminder of the strength that can only be found through faith.’

These conservative women … who can understand their strange ways??

 

 

What a time to be alive!

After bringing millions of unvetted migrants into the U.S., the hate-filled left screams about a few dozen white South African refugees

What’s with the left? After ushering in tens of millions of unvetted illegal migrants and defending their ‘right’ to stay with extraordinary tenacity, President Trump lets in about 50 South Africans Boers this week, victims of extreme violence, discrimination, and Hugo Chavez-style land expropriation, and already they’re having a cow.

The far-leftist South African government is hurling abuse at the refugees as they go, and unwittingly making the case that Trump was right all along to grant them that refugee status — nobody acts like they do without a guilty conscience:

If I were a South African and saw that kind of response, I’d get out as soon as I can, because they are likely to stop Boers from getting out at some point. Anything but give them equality and justice, which is the reason the people are leaving.

The New York Times was particularly appalling in its coverage:

The first plane carrying white South Africans who received refugee status from the Trump administration landed at Washington Dulles International Airport on Monday morning, according to a flight tracking website.

The arrival marks a drastic reversal in the United States’ refugee policies, which have long focused on helping people fleeing war, famine and genocide. President Trump essentially halted all refugee admissions programs on his first day in office before creating a pathway for Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid in South Africa, to resettle in the United States.

The group that arrived Monday on a U.S.-funded Omni Air International charter flight say they have been discriminated against, denied job opportunities and have been subject to violence because of their race. Forty-nine Afrikaners boarded the flight on Sunday, according to a spokesman for South Africa’s airport authority, after more than 8,000 people expressed interest in the program. There are scant details available about the individuals who arrived in the United States.

The South Africans who reached the United States on Monday had received expedited processing by the Trump administration — waiting no more than three months.

What ‘reversal’? Getting macheted, necklaced, and robbed of all one’s possessions solely because of one’s race comes pretty close to genocide, and in any case, fits U.S. refugee criteria.

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BBC Pushes Firearm Falsehoods, Then Quietly Changes Article

A BBC article published on Monday, in the wake of recent mass shootings, included a graphic that contained blatant lies about the fire rates of different types of firearms.

BBC later removed the graphic from the article, but they provided no editor’s note in the article and failed to announce the correction on Twitter.

The graphic, conducted by “BBC research,” claimed that a “modified semi-automatic assault rifle (AR-15)” could fire up to 1,200 rounds per minute. This ludicrous assertion was even more astonishing when they claimed that an M16 had a maximum fire rate of 950 rounds per minute, and that a semi-automatic AK-47 only fired a mere 120 rounds per minute.

 

 

A PolitiFact fact check debunked a similar claim in 2016 after the Orlando shooting when Democrat Alan Grayson said an AR-15 could fire 700 rounds per minute. PolitiFact found that “the 700-round-a-minute figure is only a theoretical benchmark, not something achievable in reality.” This is because the cyclic fire rate of these guns is around 700.

Essentially, they found that, in a perfect world with infinite capacity magazines and without the gun overheating, that a 700-900 rounds a minute fire rate would be possible. This isn’t reality, and the BBC is trying to push that figure into the stratosphere.

The BBC researchers may have missed the mark by a monumental amount on the AR-15, but they gave a much more realistic, but still implausible, figure for a semi-automatic AK-47 with 120 rounds a minute. So, why lie about the AR-15? Who fact checked this research and who were the researchers they even employed in the first place? This is at best lazy and incompetent journalism, and at worst a malicious attempt to misinform the populace about the capability of firearms.

The article has a number of further oddities in it, citing odd figures for the prices of firearms, as well as claiming that the NRA is one of “the most powerful special interest lobby groups in the US” despite their lobbying efforts being dwarfed by organizations like Planned Parenthood.

The article may have been rife with falsehoods, obfuscation, a lack of transparency, and head-scratching statistics, but the BBC’s readers need to worry. They were sure to add a handy link to the end of the article on “why you can trust BBC News.”

The New York Times’ Latest Anti-Gun News Story

Print journalism is pretty simple, really. At least it used to be. For decades there were basically two types of stories, news and opinion. Reporters wrote news stories. Columnists and a few others wrote opinion pieces.

But in recent years we’ve seen another type of journalism rise in prominence, the anti-gun story, which masquerades as a regular news piece but is chock-full of opinion and false claims. When reporters fill their anti-gun stories with their opinions their editors do nothing, because they often share their staffer’s opinions.

During my 20 years as a newspaperman, I would call out the authors of anti-gun stories whenever I saw them, but my criticisms were usually never addressed, even though we have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Nowadays, journalists talk constantly about the accuracy of their reporting. However, when they write anti-gun stories, the normal journalism standards are gone, and the editing is a complete joke. The size of the newspaper also makes a difference. Smaller newspapers are generally more accurate when writing about guns than the big ones.

Case in point: The New York Times.

On Monday, the Times published what is perhaps the most anti-gun news story seen in quite a while. It was written by reporter Glenn Thrush, who started at the newspaper in 2017 and claimed in his bio that his most “fulfilling assignment” was writing obituaries, which is odd. Writing about the recently departed is far from fulfilling.

Thrush’s story was titled “Trump Administration to Roll Back Array of Gun Control Measures.” The array was described as a reversal of the strict gun control rules Joe Biden ordered “to stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles.”

If you look closely at Thrush’s story, you will find factual errors and anti-gun hyperbole in nearly every paragraph. For example, Thrush wrote that gun dealers stripped of the Federal Firearm Licenses by Biden’s crazy zero-tolerance policy were “found to have repeatedly violated federal laws and regulations.”

This is far from the truth.

Biden’s insane policy stripped hundreds of gun dealers of their FFL’s solely because of extremely minor clerical errors. It is estimated to have increased the FFL revocation rate by 700 percent. Thrush never mentioned that, or that the ATF occasionally sent its poorly trained SWAT team to the gun dealers’ homes, or that the dealers were handcuffed and laying on their stomachs during their conversations with the ATF. In one case, the alleged suspect never got the chance to respond to any of the federal allegations, because ATF’s SWAT team shot and killed him in his own home before they had a chance to talk.

Thrush was not kind to Attorney General Pam Bondi or her plan to use the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to investigate the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to determine whether it is “engaging in a pattern or practice of depriving ordinary, law-abiding Californians of their Second Amendment rights.”

Even though this task is clearly covered by federal law, Thrush claimed that Bondi was “repurposing an investigative unit that had been used to expose racial discrimination and police violence by local enforcement agencies.”

Bondi’s decision didn’t involve any repurposing. The federal laws that govern the Civil Rights Division are very clear, unlike Biden’s ATF rules.

The author spoke to the executive director of Giffords, who falsely claimed Trump gave his seal of approval to “reckless dealers who are willing to sell guns to traffickers and criminals.” Over the years I have met more than a few gun dealers, but no one willing to sell arms to anyone with a criminal record. That this actually made it into a New York Times story is incredibly damning.

Thrush also claimed that the ATF took “an abrupt U-turn” from the schemes of Biden and ATF’s former director to “stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles that have contributed to mass shootings and exacerbated the violent crime wave that peaked after the coronavirus pandemic.”

A flood of unregulated handguns and rifles?

Remember that the next time you fill out an ATF Form 4473.

Media Efforts To Turn Signalgate Into A Scandal Are The Surest Sign It’s Not One

There are still pieces of the “Signalgate” saga of interest — like how did the worst person in Washington end up in the chat? But what would have been a relatively minor controversy has been so excessively hyped up as an epic scandal that it’s impossible to remember why it aroused anyone in the first place.

What we know from screenshots of a Signal smartphone group chat published in The Atlantic on Monday (followed by another round of screenshots on Wednesday) is that a couple of weeks ago, high-level Trump administration officials were in the chat debating the merits of a U.S. attack on the Islamic Houthi militants in Yemen. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who is proven to make things up for the sake of defaming President Trump, said he was included in the chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who has confirmed as much, though he said it was accidental and he doesn’t know how Goldberg was added.

There are legitimate concerns about federal recordkeeping and handling of sensitive communications, but to the extent that the content of the chat is newsworthy, it features an interesting debate on foreign policy between Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and others. What’s most consequential is a portion in which Hegseth tells the chat the times that some targets will be bombed on a specific day, without specific locations, names, or routes.

It’s debatable whether the information was classified (the administration says it wasn’t) or could have potentially endangered lives — what good is a time without a location? — but per usual, the media haven’t let enough be enough. Before publishing the full screenshots, Goldberg claimed that in the chat Waltz had identified a covert CIA agent, which wasn’t true; and he suggested that explicitly named in the chat were specific enemy targets, which was also untrue.

Then a Wall Street Journal editorial said the “real security scandal” was that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who is at the center of peace negotiations in Israel and Ukraine, was on the chat while in Russia and therefore, “Russian intelligence services must be listening to Mr. Witkoff’s every eyebrow flutter.” There’s no evidence that Witkoff’s phone was on him while he was in Russia, and the one message from him in the screenshots would have placed him back in the U.S. at the time it was sent. Witkoff has said he only had a secure device while he was in Russia.

Most irksome are subsequent news articles characterizing the chat screenshots as containing “details” and “specifics” on the military attacks, when it’s at best unclear how useful time stamps alone would be in thwarting them. It’s a pointless mind exercise anyway. The public knew nothing about the conversation or the military attack plans until days after they were executed. If that’s to Goldberg’s credit, then congratulations to him — he’s not a complete and total traitor to his country, even if he is anti-American in every other way.

That brings us to the enduring point of concern with this highly oversold story: Why did Mike Waltz have Goldberg’s contact information? What are the odds that this exact anti-Trump media figure would be selected to slip into a sensitive group chat? Waltz has offered doubtful explanations and theories, such as the possibility that Goldberg’s number was listed under the wrong name in his phone contacts or, even more dubious, that Goldberg’s contact was “sucked in” via a third party. Waltz has also said he thought Goldberg was “someone else.” Okay, who? Either Waltz never intended to include the contact belonging to Goldberg — “sucked in” — or he did but thought it was a different person. It can’t be both.

It’s possible Waltz really has no clue what took place there. Stranger things have happened. But his version of events isn’t satisfying. It’s to his benefit that it’s the one part of this whole episode receiving the least amount of attention from the people keeping the story alive.

And they wonder why no one trusts them anymore.

Once upon a time, people trusted the media. When someone was questioned about where they got some fact, just responding, “I heard it on the news,” was enough to silence criticism.

In fact, distrust of the media was something used in fiction to show that an individual was a little unhinged; if not a lot unhinged.

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I’m not saying the media was more trustworthy, mind you, only that they had that trust.

They don’t anymore. More and more people distrust the mainstream media, and the media seems to be at a loss for why. At least, I’d imagine they would be since they don’t seem to be addressing the problem, even as their viewership/readership plummets.

New media outlets tend to get a lot more traffic and have a lot more trust, but the mainstream media can’t understand why. For them, it’s something insidious and not the result of their own failures.

It started ages ago, but it ramped up during Trump’s first term when they decided it was their duty to make sure Trump was a one-term president. They stopped even pretending, and it just got worse.

This week, we had a couple of grand examples of it.

Let’s start with this one.

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Now, that looks pretty clear-cut, doesn’t it? Tulsi Gabbard saying Trump and Putin are tight is kind of unambiguous.

Except, it’s BS. The AP got called on it, and then posted this:

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That’s right. Gabbard wasn’t talking about Putin but Modi. They hoped they could get away with it, but they didn’t.

The story is now gone in that way, but the internet is forever.

But, in fairness, it’s not just the mainstream media that’s the problem. Even their new media allies engage in this, too.

The Daily Beast ran this on Monday:

The story comes from an upcoming book, apparently, which means legacy media at work, with The Daily Beast ginning up interest in it.

Now, we know that Trump has played fast and loose with marriage vows in the past, so this certainly sounds plausible. Except, it didn’t happen.

Well, it did, but not like they’re spinning it.

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